


Shine On You Crazy Diamond

by ThunderheadFred



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Epilogue, F/M, Inspired by Music, Post-Finale, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 04:42:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9162466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThunderheadFred/pseuds/ThunderheadFred
Summary: They meet innocently enough; a teary reunion on Ganymede that leads to drinks that leads to reminiscing that leads to hugging that leads to a really stupid idea.Bring him back.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2010.

_so..._  
_so you think you can tell_  
_Heaven from Hell_  
_blue skies from pain_  
_can you tell a green field_  
_from a cold steel rail_  
_a smile from a veil_  
_do you think you can tell?_

_did they get you to trade_  
_your heroes for ghosts_  
_hot ashes for trees_  
_hot air for a cool breeze_  
_cold comfort for change_  
_did you exchange_  
_a walk-on part in the war_  
_for a lead role in a cage?_

_how I wish_  
_how I wish you were here_  
_we’re just two lost souls_  
_swimming in a fish bowl_  
_year after year_  
_running over the same old ground_  
_what have we found_  
_the same old fears_  
_wish you were here_

_\- - -_

He died in 2068, well before his heart stopped beating. The rest was a mushroom-scented epilogue of cuppa noodles and dusty starshine. Seeing the murky past out of one eye. Seeing the dim present in the other.

Julia was dead; he was dead.  It was neither difficult nor frightening to put well-earned bullets into an empty body.

**BANG**

_\- - -_

_it’s gettin’ dark, too dark to see_  
_I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door_

_\- - -_

Faye was told she died in 2017, but she had never managed to get much of a handle on death, regardless. Reborn Valentine without a chance to protest, and shaped into a ne'er do well and sometimes killer without a lot of thought. Squeezing a trigger, the water-balloon pop of crimson out of a strange face; a dull, clothed thud. That kind of death was different than this heavy, gray meat that had once been Spike.

So different.

It was just like a space cowboy, to go off and become a suicidal romantic right when Faye had decided enough of bullshit. After forgetting everything and remembering nothing good, finally needling out that not everyone was a grand deceiver; maybe the Bebop was the home that gambling wasn't.

But like always, her bets never payed off, and Spike turned out to be the biggest deceiver of them all.

Nonchalance. Cold shoulders. Lazy grins. Cigarettes in the rain.

He'd had them all fooled.

If Faye was anything, she was an inheritor of debts. So she inherited Spike the same as she inherited a seventy-year-old body and three-hundred million in dues. She stashed him away, thanks to a few well-placed threats and the elusive Dr. Bacchus.

Let the future sort him out.

If she was spiteful, it was only because she cared.

If she was saving him, it was only because he'd spited her.

A few years in the freezer and who knows what that rock lobster might turn into.

_\- - -_

_people are crazy and times are strange_  
_I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range_  
_I used to care, but things have changed_

\- - -

Ed started in 2071, reboot!  New life, new robot papa from space, new dog, new job, new new new! Shiny penny time!

Fun fun fun fun fun! All good things

Come to an end. Following old papa's footprints on swiss-cheese Earth. Old papa sometimes remembers Françoise. Ed usually remembers robot papa. Ein barks at sand beetles. Ed and Ein find diamonds in meteorites and make a much much money!

Ed buys a boat with money, but not for fishing. It is green and it flies jzuuuum jzuuuum in space.

Ed becomes sometimes cowgirl, makes not very much money. Tomato hacks into Mars University database and brings Ed to college for three terms.

Ed is an honor student by accident! Secret teacher file says “potential genius, obsessed with non-sequiturs.”

No diploma, head the same size.

After college, Ed gets a scar. Sometimes space pirates gave it to her. Sometimes a vampire. Don't ask don't tell.

hush

After the scar, Ed becomes suddenly twenty-something. Sentences get a little longer, sometimes there is punctuation. Frequently she is called “hot-patootey” and ugly men pinch her in strange places. Often there is loneliness; but Ein is there for warmth at night. They are both happy that Data Dogs do not seem to age.

One day the green boat is out of fuel and floats untethered; Ed is a little buoy but there is nothing to fish for out here. Days of growling stomachs and chess, then Ed and Ein bounce against something big and bad that wakes them from a long, long nap.

Faye Faye is old! Her hair is long and so are her clothes. Faye and Ed laugh, Ein barks in a cricle, they get drunk and Faye flies Ed halfway across the stars to show off a handsome popsicle.

Spike is dead. Mars University did not teach Ed about this.

Reboot.

_\- - -_

_when you're strange_  
_faces come out of the rain_  
_when you're strange_  
_no one remembers your name_

_\- - -_

In 2080 there is an inter-planetary water shortage and the bonsai trees wither into ash. The Bebop keeps running, but it makes unhappy noises at night that keep Jet from sleeping very well. Denied the art of cooking by the meager scraps of the fading cowboy trade, he takes up painting instead. It gives him something to do with his one good hand, and rich idiots from Mars buy the canvas for more than it's worth. Letters from Mei-Fa about feng shui keep his mind from going belly-up in the endless vacuum.  Once in a long while Faye sends him expensive bottles of bourbon, bundled with old film noir thrillers on beta max. He wonders sometimes about her intentions, and finds himself asking if she gets lonely, but those e-mails never get sent.

He realizes quite plainly that onlookers might peek into his life and see only an empty, lonely ruin, but he's old enough and smart enough to know that's bullshit. There's no family, few friends, rarely a woman, but Jet doesn't know exactly what to do with those things anyway. He keeps busy and content, and only occasionally misses barking dogs, dancing girls, and bitching women.

The real loss is betrayed by the scrap metal he keeps. In the hangar is a red Swordfish, and every week Jet cleans it stem to stern; obedient to an old memory of trust.

_\- - -_

_there is no pain you are receding_  
_a distant ship's smoke on the horizon_  
_you are only coming through in waves_  
_your lips move_  
_but I can't hear what you're saying_

_\- - -_

It takes all three of them to come up with the idea; a Frankenstein-worthy abomination against God that only a trio of extremely drunk, depressed, not-quite-family members could possibly engineer.

They meet innocently enough; a teary reunion on Ganymede that leads to drinks that leads to reminiscing that leads to hugging that leads to a really stupid idea.

Bring him back.

Rebuild him. They have the technology.

Faye has his corpse sitting pretty in a cryogenic lab. Jet still has that SPARK mind-control device that does who knows what with brainwaves. Ein is a genuine life-hacking Data Dog. And Ed, well she's supposed to be a genius, isn't she?

Between surprisingly loud outbursts of tears, Jet raises the idea that maybe Spike wouldn't want to come back, but no one really listens to this protest, especially Jet.

Of course he wants to live.

Who doesn't want to live?

_\- - -_

_there's no chance for us_  
_its all decided for us_  
_this world has only one sweet moment set aside for us_  
_who wants to live forever?_

_\- - -_

**BANG**

Torpor. After a blink of darkness, there is at first a mess of sound. Beeps and whirs, a strange sing-song voice and the distant barking of some animal. There is no tunnel, no pinprick of angelic light. When the blackness clears, the first thing Spike sees are tits. Beautiful little tits, right in front of his face. Tan, perky, popping out of a worn-out bra that's two-sizes too small, barely covered by a scrap of tee shirt.

He always knew he would get into Heaven somehow.

With the breathless sigh of a dead man, Spike winds his arms around the alien torso and buries his face. She smells like bubble gum and puppy biscuits.

There is happy shrieking and then Spike is overwhelmed with arms and noise.

BARK BARK BARK BARK!  Welcome back cowboy!  OH GOD IT WORKED!  Spike-person!

It hits him. Hard. Like the edge of a toilet bowl bashing against his temple after a drunken, nauseous fall.

Bebop.

His first instinct is to throw them off dramatically, to make a show of it, to say HELL NO you didn't do this thing, but he only manages to groan incomprehensible syllables and flail a little.

They fuss for a time, and he doesn't have the strength to flip them the bird. Jet keeps smiling and wiping back tears like an old woman at a wedding; a woman who looks a bit like Faye is in full-on sobbing mode, and the strange creature bent-over-backwards above him with the beautiful little tits is. Edward?

He blacks out.

When he comes back to, the room is much darker and very quiet. There is a hot weight on his chest. Glancing down, he realizes the weight is the damn dog, and he growls.

Or he thinks he does. Really, he makes a choked gurgling noise that attracts the attention of something in the shadows. At the sight of huge, ghoulish green eyes, Spike goes limp and sinks into the cushions, lifeless again.

An indeterminate amount of time passes this way; between reality and a dream, half in dark and half in light, always confusing and usually too touchy-feely for comfort.  There is almost always a god-damned dog on him.

In a Universe of small blessings there is at least one comfort. For the first time in a long time, his eyes are seeing only what is in front of him; be it a flickering computer display of his vital signs, a tearful face leaning too close, or Ed's shockingly nice tits. If anything has stayed dead, it seems to be the past and not the man. This, at least, he can be happy about.  Or something like happy, he's not sure anymore.

One day, with an abrupt randomness that startles even himself, He lurches out of unconsciousness and shouts,

“WHAT YEAR IS IT?”

There is no one in the room. The dog is sitting on his shins. It looks up and barks once, sharply.

Spike swears and kicks his legs, the dog jumps away with a disgruntled yelp, and Spike crashes to the floor in a tangle of electrodes and intravenous cables.

He is bleeding; still riddled with fresh bullet holes as if he had been shot yesterday.

Perhaps he was. He doesn't know.

He counts two times that he's died without dying; starting to lose a grip on just what it is that constitutes living, he shouts wordlessly and it is a treacherous sound.

Footsteps thunder in and they are upon him again, molly-coddling and trying to get him back onto that sweaty vinyl couch. He's disillusioned and tired of shit, so he smacks their hands away and throws something across the room before realizing it's attached to his arm. A tube rips painfully out of his skin and a squirt of blood gushes into open air. A computer screeches loudly.

He can't quite stand so he sits akimbo on the floor, bleeding silently. He is acutely aware of the feeling of blood in his veins. It is not a life-affirming feeling; it makes him sick.

“Is this my blood?” he shouts irrationally, suddenly overcome with horror. “IS THIS EVEN MINE?”

Have they pumped him full of someone else? Or worse, matched his synthetic eye with synthetic blood? Like matching overpriced shoes to an ugly tie. It's tacky. He shudders.

No one seems to be able to answer this, perhaps they don't understand the raving.

“You need to lie down,” says the woman who looks like Faye. She reaches for him tenderly, her eyes are full of guilt.

“Don't touch me,” he says. It is not cutting, or even angry. Quite simply, he is beyond the pale. He just wants to sit here for as long as it takes. He just wants to be alone in the dark.

He wants to be dead.

But they don't care about that, do they?

The woman steps back as if dealt a mortal wound; she hiccups once and then runs sobbing from the room. Hysterics.

“What year is it?” Spike says again. He picks electrodes from his body, watching with apparent interest as his skin stretches away from his bones.

“2084,” says Jet, his voice breathless.

Spike looks at his once-partner and his mouth hangs open for a moment.

Then he laughs. It is a cold, cruel peal of noise that sounds a lot like desperate sobbing.  Jet backs out of the room, visibly shaken.

Spike imagines he's alone and the laughter does turn to tears, and he cries like he's never cried in his life. Cries until his throat is blazing with red pain, cries until his face is crusted with salt. Cries until he is nearly unconscious.

He's lost a lot of blood, after all.

Someone hoists him up, and he's too groggy to put up a fight as he is placed back on the yellow couch. Small, orange hands plug him into a few of the machines, but not all of them, thank God. The dog climbs onto the couch and nuzzles his side, whimpering softly.

“...hate. Dog.” he mutters, almost inaudibly, desperate for a cigarette.

“Stupid Spike-Person. Ein loves you. Lots and lots and lots and...” says a scratchy, thin voice. She sounds like a cat. “Hush hush. Smile.”

She grins ear-to-ear and stares at him. He frowns, not quite angrily, and swears under his breath.

When she re-bandages all of his wounds he watches carefully, his eyes blinking with slow a-synchronicity; the whole scene bathed in a stupendous drunken haze.

It is 2084 said Jet, and Edward is no longer a kid that Spike can dislike merely on principle.  Standing in little androgynous Ed's stead is a small, waify woman without a scrap of fat and fashion sense so bad that it's good. He can't stop looking at her tits.

As she wraps him with gauze, she is not sentimentally gropey like the others, and yet neither does she have the uncomfortable stuffiness of a professional.  Within her joint-less, wobbly ministrations is an element of long-forgotten naivete, like they are playing doctor.  He finds he cannot bite back a thin-lipped smile when she tapes smiley-face band-aids over his gunpowder burns.

“It's the year of the dragon,” she purrs suddenly in her sing-song kitten voice.

It takes him a while to respond. His eyes have drifted half-shut, and he finds his hand has been stroking the dog's fur against his will.

“Hng?”

“The year. Dragon-year. Good good year.”

He can't think of anything to say, not even a hmmm. His hand stills and Ein licks his fingers. Something touches his lips and he closes his eyes. A kiss?

The numb taste of menthol daubs his tongue.

A cigarette. He can't help it, he grins. He is so disoriented that the smell alone is enough to get him high.

Edward leans over him, she has been perched by his head on the arm of the sofa. She is a cat. A cat. A cat with a lighter, and she knows how to use it.

He falls asleep with the cigarette in his mouth and wakes up with ash in his eyes.

Smiling a little.

_\- - -_

_let those bastards believe_  
_dry your eyes and we'll leave_  
_she's not loving you anymore_

_\- - -_

He only talks to Ed. It will take him a long time to forgive Jet and Faye, who are god-damned grown-ups and should have known better than to raise the fucking dead.

Faye has entered her late thirties with grace and good-looks, but that doesn't excuse her. Like a human being, she finally deigned to fully clothe herself and grow her hair out, but she retains a spark of that attitude that had always bristled his neck. Even when he tries, Spike can't manage two words edgewise before she explodes or starts apologizing.  Jet is the same lonely old man he was to begin with, that was always his weakness. Spike had thought the intention to die poetically and stay dead had been perfectly clear all those years ago when he had marched off to face the Dragons. He had fancied the noble-seeming Jet had understood that. Perhaps he did understand at the time. Thirteen years is a long time to forget, but it hadn't been nearly so long for Spike.

He had blinked and woken up a twice-dead man.

He wasn't ready to talk to either of them.  All they would want to talk about is why and why not and death death death.

Not Edward.

Ed liked talking about bio-luminescent jellyfish. She did hand-stands, lost at checkers, and danced wildly to Misfit records.  She played Angelfuck at full volume and writhed like a meth-addict. She sang in the shower; so loud that he could pick out the lyrics. With her, there was a casual intimacy that made it seem as if he'd never died at all. Like they'd always been thicker than thieves. Like they were in love.

He likes it.

_\- - -_

_pull yourself together_  
_no use crying forever_  
_because there's too many fish in the sea_  
_too many fish in the sea_

_\- - -_

He does not forget Julia. Impossible. No love ever like the first, but that Spike is dead as sure as this new Spike is living. Now his mismatched eyes are both seeing the present, and Julia is thirteen years gone. Sixteen, if you count correctly. He dreams about her sometimes, but the dreams are no longer dark and rain-soaked. She kisses him and smiles, and the sun shines. She is happy.

What the fuck, he should be happy too, then.

He and Ed are sorting through old storage boxes in the Bebop, going through things that are covered in ages of dust. Here is a pair sunglasses; gold Elvis aviators with polarized lenses. He puts them on and looks over his shoulder at Edward.

She smiles in her huge wide-mouthed way and gives him a double thumbs up.

Without a lot of thought, Spike takes off the sunglasses and breaks them in half.  Ed shouts, “HEY!” but Spike continues snapping bits of the sunglasses away. Finally, he threads a leather cord through one half and straps the contraption to his head. That eye won't ever see the past again.

He sees Ed through the purple lens.

“Eyepatch! Double cool! Look what Ed found!”

She snaps open a white lace parasol and a sparkling wad of confetti explodes out, startling them both. Ein barks in mad circles and doesn't stop.

After that, Spike starts talking to Faye and Jet again. He tries to like them, genuinely this time. Hunting, he learns, has all but dried up; overhauling the faulty lunar gates in favor of a new transit system has re-charged the economy. People have started moving back to Earth. They've built a new fucking moon and opened fucking Moon Disney. He isn't sure what kind of life he is cut out for in this new world order, but all of his bad blood has no use anymore.

He might not have a drop of his own blood left anymore, he remembers occasionally. This is a new Spike with new plumbing. Spike with an eye-patch and a clean suit. He's doing alright.

He notices that Jet and Faye are making interesting eyes at each other; they watch old black and white movies and cook bell peppers and beef when no one is hungry.  Sometimes they both go missing for long stretches of time.

Is that what happens to people when they get past a certain age, he wonders? Do we all just give up and pair off, figure out that it's just not worth the angst of solitude? Figure out, like idiots, that we aren't singular creatures after all?

Every once in a while this sunshiny new world of theirs tastes like sucralose, and Spike thinks he might gag on it.

Then Ed will cartwheel in and flash those tits and the world tastes very suddenly of copper.

_\- - -_

_we're getting closer and closer_  
_and warmer and warmer_  
_my heart is racing and pacing_  
_your dad's gonna kill me_

_\- - -_

It happens kind of all at once one day. One minute Spike is alone in the hangar looking at the Swordfish, and then Ed is standing next to him, teetering on her long, skinny legs.

Then somehow, as if via jump-cut, they are mostly naked on the floor. Naked enough, really, for what needs doing.

After that, she sleeps in his room. Sometimes she curls up at the foot of the bed and he can't quite mask the quirk of his eyebrow. It is the first time in his life that someone has stayed, and he is surprised to learn that nothing changes. She still does handstands, and loses at checkers, and dances to Angelfuck.

They also fuck to Angelfuck and holy hell is that something else entirely.

Her kisses taste like jumper cables and bazooka gum, her hair smells like dry desert heat. She is sinfully flexible and all kinds of adventurous, and never once shows a shadow of embarrassment. Sometimes she runs around completely naked, as if she had forgotten to put clothes on that morning, and this disturbs everyone but Spike. Her apparent free-wheeling strangeness is levied by moments of absolute sanity, which in their random infrequency only help to make her seem more strange.

He asks her about the scar on her back, but she tra-la-las around the subject every time and it makes Spike worry despite himself.

Months zip by and he realizes with a twist of the small intestine that they aren't just fucking around anymore. On a whim, they go to Moon Disney together and look at cheap apartments on the dark side of the moon.  On a nondescript day in February, she walks in out of nowhere while he is reading The Quiet American and takes off her shirt. Sitting down in front of him, she bends forward and presses her check into the floor. He looks at her scar.

“I was a cowgirl,” she says, in perfect English. “An old bounty-head got out of jail and decided he didn't like being taken down by a skinny little kid. Stinky gas didn't keep him away, I wasn't strong enough to fight big bad.”

She pauses for a long time and the silence says everything. Finally,

“Afterward I got my gun, I'd never used it before. Pop Pop he was a corpse.  Ein bit off one of his fingers.  And now I have a scar.”

Her big kitty eyes stare at him, she has shed all her tears about this long ago. But the gray-white skin remains; a tiny dead part of her that matches the tiny dead parts of him.

He falls down to the floor and kisses her with rare, searching compassion. For the first time, they make love. Slow, sweet; it aches and has an aftertaste of honey.

He kisses her like Julia kissed him once, and he realizes that Spike Spiegel and Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV have somehow fallen in love.

**BANG**

_\- - -_

_nobody knows where you are_  
_how near or how far  
_shine on you crazy diamond__

 _pile on many more layers_  
_and I’ll be joining you there  
_shine on you crazy diamond__

 _we’ll bask in the shadow of yesterday’s triumph_  
_sail on the steel breeze_  
_c'mon you boy-child, you winner and loser_  
_c'mon you miner for truth and delusion and shine!_

**Author's Note:**

> Playlist:
> 
> “Wish You Were Here” - Pink Floyd  
> “Knockin' On Heaven's Door” - Bob Dylan  
> “Things Have Changed” - Bob Dylan  
> “People are Strange” - The Doors  
> “Comfortably Numb” - Pink Floyd  
> “Who Wants to Live Forever” - Queen  
> “Angelfuck” - The Misfits  
> “Too Many Fish in the Sea” - The Marvelettes  
> “Good Girl, Bad Boy” - Junior Senior  
> “Shine on you Crazy Diamond” - Pink Floyd


End file.
